The Handmaids Tale

Don't let the bastards grind you down

I read eight books this week because I have been channeling stress into stress reading but I wont be writing about all of them - unfortunately I make a terrible stress writer.

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Originally published in 1985 this iconic book has gained popularity over different periods of time as a striking symbol of female defiance. It surged in popularity in 2016 after Donald Trump was elected and became an international protest symbol. Dozens of women marched in silence through cities: Heads bowed, dressed in red cloaks and white, wide brimmed bonnets. Margaret Atwood’s novel seared this image into the minds of reader with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery – and wear this uniform to as a sign of their subservience.

The handmaids tale is a chilling tale set in the USA that is toppled in a coup establishing the theocratic government of Gilead. You’re never quite sure about the nature of the force in power. Is it the Army? The Church? or the two combined? It is a totalitarian regime set in an era where birthrate has nosedived and many of the ruling elite have been rendered infertile due to environmental toxins. Still-fertile women are rounded up for the job of reproduction. The fertile women are kept as handmaids in the houses of high ranking officials where they’re expected to bear a child for the family and once that is done they are promptly packed off to another house to do it all over again. It is a highly oppressive, dictatorial theocracy that disregards the fundamental liberty and freedom of women who are drawn and quartered into categories. Handmaids who will bear children, Marthas who will do housekeeping, Wives who will, well, just be wives and Aunts who will train, preach and maintain discipline among women.

Picture this state: You are a woman but you have no name. Your identity, property, job everything has been taken from you. Your name is now ‘Of’ followed by the name of your Master. You are Offred, Ofglen, Ofkyle - a nobody. If you fail to provide a child, you are banished to the Colonies to die cleaning toxic waste.

It is written in a first person narrative of a handmaid, Offred, whose real name is not shared throughout the book. She narrates the story in a series of flashbacks that are divided between her life in Gilead and her former life before the coup. There is a clear demarcation of before and after.

The writing is quiet, powerful and the story is always bubbling under the surface of the prose. Atwood doesn't waste words - she writes with subtlety and richness.

This book is speculative fiction - a body of work that proposes a future which could conceivably happen without necessarily any advances in technology . While science fiction has aliens and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen. Almost Every aspect of the book was inspired by social and political events of the early 1980s, when she wrote it.

In some ways to think of this work as fiction at-all is a sign of privilege. In many parts of the world the handmaids tale is, more or less, still the reality for many women.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

(Testaments is a sequel published in 2019 - 34 years after the handmaids tale. It was the winner of the 2019 Booker prize. I am presently reading it and its every bit as gripping and brilliant as I expected)

Saima